Pluto Walks the Earth, Chapter 26

Bad Trip

Read Pluto Walks the Earth, Chapter 25: Digging Up Dirt

Felix

Manny

This boy is a go-getter, I’ll tell you. He’s putting in 30-40 hours on fix-it jobs, pulling a weekend shift at the store and, in his spare time, getting me $12,500 to sit on a stage for 45 minutes to brag about having a white employee. In addition, I’m getting free travel to Las Vegas, where I have a chance to make a business contact important to my tribal-sacrament enterprise. And, in addition to that, he saved me from choking to death and got me on every TV station in New Mexico. Not bad for, at that point, two weeks knowing him. So now I’m a little nervous telling him I can’t go. To Vegas. I mean, I’m supposed to meet him on a job, pretty much right now, and I’m sitting in my truck at Sunoco with the engine and A/C on trying to figure out how to finesse this.

See, a couple of years back, I got in a jam on a DUI. Well, it was a little more than a DUI, because they pulled the tarp off my truck bed and located two kilos of weed that wasn’t mine — it was sort of a consignment thing — but they jammed me up on a possession-with-intent-to-distribute beef and, long story short, they let me plead out to sidestep the penitentiary, but to get probation I had to cop to a felony. So I still can’t travel out of state without the permission of my probation officer, and when I told him my plans he said, “Not next week, not next month, not next year. The State of New Mexico just loves you too darn much.”